Did Trump Just Prevent WWIII?

Guest Post by Jenna McCarthy

(Sorry, I think my Pollyanna is showing again.)

Me: You cannot possibly make the potential that the U.S. just soft-launched WWIII even remotely lighthearted or amusing.
Myself: Seriously, don’t even try.
I: Hold my beer.

In the ever-confusing, always-dramatic saga that is Middle Eastern diplomacy, there are some moves that make you go, “Wait, what?” Like Trump ordering airstrikes on Iran over the weekend, for instance. Trump, the guy who ran for president (and won!) on a platform of no-more-forever-wars—particularly in the Middle East.

I’m no defense analyst, but conducting unprovoked aerial assaults sure seems like an express ticket to the very kind of foreign entanglements POTUS once vowed to avoid like the salad section of the McDonald’s menu.

Obviously, lots of folks are furious. Like, ready-to-key-your-cheating-ex’s-Lambo livid. I get it; I really do. My feet are planted firmly in camp “The U.S. Really Needs to Work on Minding Its Own Freaking Business.” But before we all start printing NEOCON DON t-shirts and retweeting memes of Trump straddling a Tomahawk missile, consider this: what if the move wasn’t about starting a war at all? What if it was about preventing one? More specifically, about stopping Israel from launching a much bigger, much uglier one—by stopping Iran from building the nukes that would prompt Israel to make such a move in the first place.

To be clear: I’m not claiming to be the architect of this hypothesis; it’s just the one of the many I encountered online while debating whether or not to even touch this topic that resonated with me the most.

“We did not attack the nation of Iran,” JD Vance said in a press conference. “We did not attack any civilian targets. We didn’t even attack military targets outside the three nuclear weapons facilities that we thought were important to accomplish our goal of preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon. If you look at what we did, it was very precise, very narrowly tailored to our objective.”

“Our objective,” presumably, being to avoid a full-scale global nuclear Armageddon.

Here’s the thing: Trump has said eleventy thousand times that “Iran cannot have nuclear weapons.” Even CNN’s Van Jones called on “progressives” to “get on board” with that ideology.

“I think progressives underestimate how dangerous Iran is,” Jones said. “Iran is not a normal country. Normal countries don’t blind women because they showed some hair. They don’t empower gangs and proxies to surround the country and fire rockets and rape people. Two things are clear: the “what”: they cannot have a bomb; and the “why”: because they say ‘death to America,’ ‘death to Israel,’ and ‘death to all the Jews.’ One of those should offend you, if you’re a progressive. At least one should offend you.”

What’s more, Israel has been itching for an excuse to go after Iran’s nuclear facilities for decades. Not in a subtle, diplomatic way, but in the way your mite-infested dog scratches its ear with one of those hind-leg windmills. Loudly. Frequently. Publicly.

The problem? Every time Israel threatens action, the global community freaks out, the stock market does a backflip, and Israel suddenly remembers that Iran has proxies in all sorts of nearby, inconvenient places.

Enter Trump, stage right, with a fully armed drone and a dream.

Instead of Israel being the one to press the Big Red Button and then face the world’s collective fury, Trump essentially said, “Don’t worry, Bibi. I got this one.”

No boots on the ground, no collateral damage, just a few laser-focused strikes and boom—literally and figuratively—Israel gets the outcome it wanted without being the guy who threw the first punch.

It’s the diplomatic equivalent of your brother showing up to school and punching the bully on your behalf. Sure, it’s still messy. And yeah, the principal isn’t thrilled. But you didn’t technically break any rules. (And you definitely didn’t get suspended.)

“The supreme art of war,” said Sun Tzu, Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and author of The Art of War, “is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” It’s not a bad strategy, TBH.

This isn’t about some unholy alliance to Israel. It was not an attack on Iran. It was a targeted assault on specific hostile forces that are destabilizing the Middle East and threatening global security.

[Author takes a quick break to look at self in mirror and demand who even are you we’re a comedy writer for crying out loud pull it together woman]

Obviously, the situation isn’t all sunshine and strategic snuggles. We dropped literal bombs on a country that’s hardly known for turning the other cheek. Retaliation remains very much on the table—“sleeper cells” are real and they’re terrifying—and if things spiral, we could all be Googling “do I live in a no-fly zone?” while panic-buying powdered milk again. But in the Machiavellian buffet of foreign policy, maybe Trump ordered the least awful option on the menu.

Like I said, I’m no military strategist. Even the Battleship board game stresses me out. I hate everything about war and wish the world would just put on its giant get-along-shirt and grow up. And, as you know, my go-to reflex is always to find a silver lining, no matter how faint, obscure, or even unlikely it may be. So, feel free to beat me up (gently, if you could) in the comments. I welcome respectful dissent, always.

FYI, “my first world war kinda nervous” is trending all over the web.